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      Book

      Caring for Community
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      Book

      Caring for Community

      DOI link for Caring for Community

      Caring for Community book

      Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels

      Caring for Community

      DOI link for Caring for Community

      Caring for Community book

      Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels
      ByMarijke Denger
      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2018
      eBook Published 20 December 2018
      Pub. Location New York
      Imprint Routledge
      DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026539
      Pages 182
      eBook ISBN 9780429026539
      Subjects Language & Literature
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      Denger, M. (2018). Caring for Community: Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026539

      ABSTRACT

      Caring for Community: Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels focuses on four highly acclaimed publications in order to argue for a new understanding of community and its ethical framework in recent literary texts. Traditionally, community has been understood to function on the basis of individuals’ readiness to establish relationships of reciprocal responsibility. This book, however, argues that community and non-reciprocity need not be mutually exclusive categories. Examining works by leading contemporary postcolonial authors and reading them against Judith Butler’s post-9/11 concept of global political community, the book explores how concrete acts of responsibility can be carried out in recognition of various others, even and precisely when those others cannot be expected to respond. The literary analyses draw on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to care, hospitality and the ethical encounter between self and other. Overall, this book establishes that the novels’ protagonists, by investing in an ethics of responsibility that does not require reciprocity, acquire the agency to envisage new forms of community. By reflecting on the nature and effect of this agency and its representation in contemporary literary texts, the book also considers the role of postcolonial studies in addressing highly topical questions regarding our co-existence with others.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      chapter |33 pages

      Introduction

      Community “Beyond the Borders”

      chapter 1|25 pages

      Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

      From a Crumbling Villa to a Porous Community

      chapter 2|27 pages

      “Building the New”?

      Untimely Community in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil

      chapter 3|28 pages

      Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

      From Unwanted History to Unconditional Hospitality

      chapter 4|29 pages

      Spectral Agency and the Ghostly Self

      Towards an Unconditional Community in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting

      chapter 5|19 pages

      Rethinking Community and Its Borders in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures

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